ipdice.com

Building a container-based IP address web site on Amazon ECS.

Please be forewarned that this lab is fairly expensive. AWS promises to save you up to 50% on compute costs by utilizing autonomous scaling, provisioning, and usage-based pricing. However the costs of even a lab environment add up quickly. Here the top costs:

• VPC costs 💵
  • includes public IP address pricing (Elastic IP)
    • For example us-east-1 (USE1-PublicIPv4:InUseAddress)
    • On 2/1/2024 Amazon started charging for public IP addresses in use
      • https://cybernews.com/tech/amazon-web-services-charge-ipv4-addresses/
      • Single IP is 3.60/month or $43.80/year
• ELB costs 💵
  • you pay for AWS resources to run the load balancer(s)
  • per application load balancer-hour
  • per LCU-hour (load-based)
  • redue the number of regions
• ECS costs 💵
  • you pay for the memory and vCPU resourcs the containers use
  • reduce costs by reducing the minimum required CPU and memory in the Task definition
  • reduce scaling - use step scaling and reduce the maximum number of tasks
  • reduce the number of regions
• Route53 - monthly cost
• EC2 costs / EC2 - Other
  • Idle Elastic IPs incur a small fee
  • ELB usage is charged a small fee

Learn more at https://www.appsdevpro.com/blog/aws-fargate-pricing/

Please be forewarned that this lab is fairly expensive. AWS promises to save you up to 50% on compute costs by utilizing autonomous scaling, provisioning, and usage-based pricing. However the costs of even a lab environment add up quickly. Here the top costs:

• VPC costs 💵
  • includes public IP address pricing (Elastic IP)
    • For example us-east-1 (USE1-PublicIPv4:InUseAddress)
    • On 2/1/2024 Amazon started charging for public IP addresses in use
      • https://cybernews.com/tech/amazon-web-services-charge-ipv4-addresses/
      • Single IP is $3.60/month or $43.80/year
• ELB costs 💵
  • you pay for AWS resources to run the load balancer(s)
  • per application load balancer-hour
  • per LCU-hour (load-based)
  • redue the number of regions
• ECS costs 💵
  • you pay for the memory and vCPU resourcs the containers use
  • reduce costs by reducing the minimum required CPU and memory in the Task definition
  • reduce scaling - use step scaling and reduce the maximum number of tasks
  • reduce the number of regions
• Route53 - monthly cost
• EC2 costs / EC2 - Other
  • Idle Elastic IPs incur a small fee
  • ELB usage is charged a small fee

Learn more at https://www.appsdevpro.com/blog/aws-fargate-pricing/

Overview and Genesis

After building a number of container web apps and deploying them to on-premise Kubernetes (k8), I wanted to try a real-world use case. Patterning after https://github.com/doritoes/ipgiraffe.com, I am creating a new site to return a more complete and playful IP Address web site experience.

Amazon Elastic Container Service (ECS) offers a simplified experience with tight integration with AWS services. This is just what I want for my lab.

• I haven't used ECS before
• Use Route 53 and CloudFront for multi-regions support
• Supports service auto scaling (container instances)
• Supports capacity provider scaling

This demonstration site has the following features:

• No ads
• No SQL backend
• Serverless computing on Fargate
• Small container based on Alpine Linux
• Demonstrate global autoscaling container applications without breaking the bank (don't want to cost too much for this free site)
• Gradually release new experiences to the web application
• Integration with external geo-location API
• Fun easter eggs to find

Project Goals

Here are the goals I had for this project. This is mean to be a step-by-step Lab exercise that you can follow along to.

IMPORTANT I am shutting down the web site https://ipdice.com and the companion site https://iploc8.com due to the AWS expenses being too high for my needs.

In Scope

Completed

• Register domain name
• Bootstrapping repo on Github
• Bootstrapping image on Docker Hub
• Basic IP address experience
• One region built
• Multi-region
• Added first two easter eggs
• Multi-region
• Add anti-snoop protection
• Integration with https://www.ip-api.com for geo-location

Out of Scope

• Amazon Elastic Kubernetes Service (EKS) doesn't meet my criteria for integrating a new technology for me. I have done other Kubernetes labs (here and here).
• Azure and GCP are out of scope for this lab

Step-by-Step

1. Pre-Requisites
2. Create and Build the Web App Container
3. Configuring ECS
4. Configuring CloudFront
5. Testing and Monitoring
6. Adding Regions
7. Next Steps

References

My favorite IP address checking web sites:

• https://ipgoat.com
• https://ipchicken.com
• http://icanhazip.com (just the IP address, great from command line: curl http://icanhazip.com)
• https://api.ipify.org/ (another bare IP address service)
• http://www.ipdragon.com
• http://ipturtle.com
• https://ip.me
• https://whatismyip.org/

More "IP Animals":

• https://ipmonkey.com
• https://ipfish.com (redirects to ipchicken.com)

IP Lookup API options

• https://medium.com/@ipdata_co/what-is-the-best-commercial-ip-geolocation-api-d8195cda7027
• https://ip-api.com
  • Free rate-limited http-only lookup without API key
  • Paid unlimited https lookups with API key
  • Demonstrated on IPloc8.com
• https://db-ip.com/
  • Great data including threat level, "isCrawler", weatherCode, and a somewhat unreliable "useageType"
• https://ipstack.com/
  • Moderate value, addes continent, language, currency, threat level
  • Breaks out proxy, TOR, and crawler
  • very limited free option 100 queries/month

My IP address checking web sites:

• https://ipgiraffe.com
• https://ipdice.com - decommissioned
• https://iploc8.com (API) - decommissioned

My other web sites:

• https://unclenuc.com
• https://www.cottagewifi.com/ (I have a lot of content that I want to share here)

To find your private LAN IP address:

• https://www.avast.com/c-how-to-find-ip-address
• https://nordvpn.com/what-is-my-ip/